Upgrading an Amazon EKS cluster is usually seen as a routine maintenance task. You update the Kubernetes version -> upgrade your add-ons -> refresh your worker nodes, and move on. However, our EKS 1.32 → 1.33 upgrade was different. This was not just a Kubernetes version upgrade. It was a major operating system transition because EKS 1.33 no longer provides EKS-optimized Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) AMIs. This meant our worker nodes had to move to Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) (or anoth